Chapter 47 Berlin

Berlin The streets of Berlin are wide and clean, and London and Paris can't keep up; and because of the recession, the traffic on and off seems less.Walking here, you can breathe the air leisurely, without looking around and dodging.It is also very easy to find the way, because the streets are roughly criss-crossed, and there are few "sideways and oblique exits".The largest and widest one is called Under the Bodhi Tree. The University of Berlin, the National Library, the New National Academy of Painting, and the State Opera House are all on this street.The east end is followed by Museum Island, the Cathedral, and the Forbidden City; the west end reaches the famous Brandenburg Gate, which is less than two miles long.After that gate is the Garden of Till, and the street stretches straight down—this is a long way, thirty-seven miles.The Brandenburg Gate, like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, is also monumental.The building was built at the end of the eighteenth century, somewhat imitating the style of Nessi Krishna in Athens.It is sixty-six feet high and sixty-eight and a half yards wide; on each side are six Doric stone columns.On the top is the statue of victory standing in a four-horse carriage, majestic and solemn, showing the spirit of the capital of Germany.The statue was taken away by Napoleon as a trophy in 1807, but it was brought back by German troops seven years later.

Going west from the Bodhi tree, as soon as you go out of this gate, you will immediately feel refreshed, and there is another world in front of you; the open space, the endless green trees, is the Tire Garden.This is the largest park in Berlin, six miles from east to west and about two miles from north to south.The terrain is naturally good, and the trees are planted very cleverly. Small lakes and creeks, hidden or visible, are also arranged in places.The avenues are like the spokes of a wheel, approaching the axis.Lush tall trees are lined up beside the road; sometimes there are some white stone statues lined up under the trees, which look whiter against the dark green background.The trails are like veins on leaves, I don't know how many there are.Follow the path, there will always be a good place to live up to you.There are also many flower beds in the garden.Rosen flower bed is the famous one, and the roses are the best.A natural enclosure surrounded in a circle, densely covered with small round green leaves; the top of the wall is uneven.There are two small square pools in the altar, full of snow-white water lotus flowers, delicately supported on the leaves, like sleepy star eyes.Between the two pools is a statue of a queen; the fragrance and color of flowers around it seem to be her offerings.Till Garden is more artificial than natural.The real nature is yet another realm.I once walked through a forest in the "New West District" outside the city.The sparse trees, tall and thin trunks, and the random winding road under the trees remind people of Ni Yunlin's painting books.It didn't look that big, but it took two o'clock to walk, but the men and women who were often seen in the city and outside of Berlin had not yet left.Women probably walk with bare feet and bright arms, but they are not the same as men.They are not as slender as Parisian women, nor as stiff as London women, but they are naturally good.Some people say they are too thick, but they have strength.The Spleen River runs through the city of Berlin, and there are many people rowing on the river.Often a man and a woman sit in pairs, the man wearing only a bathing suit, perhaps bare-chested and short trousers.The people who watched it were not surprised and applauded.I once saw a female college student pointing at a person rowing like this and saying, "It's beautiful!" Praising the body and exercising has become their morality.Looking outside on the waterside on Saturdays and Sundays, men, women, young and old, everyone has a little athlete style.A step further is the so-called "natural movement".Everyone simply doesn't want to scoop up some clothes, that's really a natural life.There's a place for this, and of course it's not everywhere.But books and magazines are readily available.There are also such movies.The movements of those people are beautiful and soft, a bit like Tai Chi.This set against the background of the long sky and the sea is indeed beautiful and harmonious.A few days ago, it was reported in the newspaper that the German authorities wanted to ban them, which seems a little troublesome.

The important museums in Berlin are concentrated on a small island in the Sperai River.This is called Museum Island.Although it is called an island, because there are too many lands around, the river is almost crowded, and with sixteen bridges, you don't feel like you are in an island when you walk up.There are a total of seven museums on the island, six of which are connected.The most magnificent are the Pergamon and the Near Eastern Monuments.Bergamon is an important city in Greece in Asia Minor, which is now Bergama.The Berlin Museum group excavated there and unearthed a great temple, which was used to worship the great god Zeus.This hall was built 2,200 years ago, with a grand scale and exquisite carvings.When it was excavated, it was already broken; after painstaking research by scholars, they knew what it looked like before, so they repaired it accordingly and placed it in a large specially built room.The size of the room makes it difficult for people to look at the palace in any way.The roof is full of glass, so that the light can come from above, which is the most uniform; the walls are light blue, which makes the white stone temple more divine.The hall is in the shape of a square lock, surrounded by stone pillars of the Ionian style, like a porch.Where there is a lock, there are several steps.There are also several floors at both ends, each with a temple foundation; on the temple foundation and under the pillars are the famous "wall carvings".Wall sculpture (Frieze) is a special decoration in Greek architecture; some stories are carved in half-depth on the narrow and long stone strips, embedded in the middle of the wall.This wall sculpture is quite famous.For example, the wall sculptures of the Bassinon Temple in Athens, which are now in the British Museum, are.Here it is one hundred and thirty-two yards long, part of which has been removed to the opposite wall of the temple.The engraved story is the battle between the gods of Olympia and the giants of the sons of the earth.Among them, the characters are full of energy and live through disasters.Another large room houses the remnants of Roman architecture.One is the large three-seat door, which has two upper and lower floors, and the upper floor is all for decoration.Six pairs of Corinthian-style stone pillars are used on each of the two floors, and the doors are alternated with each other, separating a slightly winding corridor.The three doors on the upper floor are solid, and there is a statue inside each, and the whole is neat and beautiful.One is the small temple.Both are in the second century.

The things in the Near Eastern Monuments were excavated in Babylon and Assyria by the German Oriental Society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.The Ischtar Gate in Babylon in the middle is the most magnificent.The gate building was built in the hands of the second king of Nabukad Naisha 2,500 years ago.The gate ring was thirty-nine feet high, and the battlements were forty-nine feet, all built of blue enameled bricks.There are pairs of dragons (different from the so-called dragons in China) and cattle in relief on the wall, with yellow and white alternated;The dragon is the sacred object of the Babylonian city god Matt, and the cow is the sacred object of the great god Adar.The portraits of these animals are sparsely arranged, with only two rows on one wall, and only one row on the horns; the shapes are also simple and uniform.The color is very vivid on the blue ground.It really looks like a large tapestry pattern.There is also the wall of the main hall in the Babylonian palace, which was made at the same time as the Israelites, and the colors are the same, but the plant patterns are the main ones.Blue enamel bricks are also used for the bases of the inflected walls on both sides of the Ma De sacrificial path; on them are carved lions walking forward.This sacrificial path leads directly to the Israelite Gate, and now a short section has been repaired, and it is still placed in front of the Israelite Gate.Another model is the entire city of Babylon.This can also be comforting.The wall of the Ashurbasian Palace is placed opposite the Israelite Gate, and of course it was repaired: the surrounding arches are square, and the columns are thin and dense, and there are many straight lines showing elegance.

In the center of the first floor of the New Museum is a hall.Two broad, ornate staircases seemed to occupy the large room, but the room felt enormous all the same.Everything in the room is tall; facing the two large replica statues facing the stairs, and the large historical murals on the walls on both sides, it makes people feel the atmosphere as soon as they enter the door.The courage of the Germans really belongs to them.The upstairs was originally an engraving showroom, but this year it was converted into a Gothic exhibition.There are portraits of Goethe and his friends, his paintings, illustrations for his books, etc. "Faust" has the most illustrations, and everyone draws the same thing with different tastes.Downstairs is the Egyptian antiquities showroom, with large and small "mummy"; there are also children's.Some have on the head a board on which the face of the deceased is drawn; this is done in melted wax, in a manner lost.This seems to be a clever arrangement of the ancients, so that after thousands of years, they can still recognize their faces.There is also an ethnographic museum in another street, divided into two houses.The collection is both rich and rare.The first courtyard in Turpan has the most murals.Those intact ones are really wonderful and solemn; those fragmentary ones are also antique.There are a lot of things from China and Japan, and they are displayed in a very systematic manner. I am afraid that the Chinese and Japanese can do it themselves.The Japanese lacquerware and paintings in the second courtyard are very good.Prehistoric materials are collected in this yard.There are three rooms dedicated to displaying the relics obtained from the excavation of the city of Troy by Heinrich Schlieman from 1871 to 1890.

The Forbidden City is located in the north of Museum Island. It was changed into a museum in 1921, and it is divided into two parts of history and crafts.The historical part is the public and private houses used by the royal family.Each of these houses has a different shape; roof, wall, floor, color, furnishings, each has its own style.But the splendor and delicacy are the same.There is a roof in the shape of a dome, with Venus on the blue ground, just like the scene of the night sky.Another room has a large piece of umbrella-shaped silk, as if covering the sun.Another one uses the pattern of "ancient Luoqian" as the decoration of the whole room.Painting or hanging on the wall.The floor is inlaid with various patterns of fine wood, which is extremely smooth.The exterior of foreign palaces is often not as magnificent as that of China, but the exquisite decoration inside is definitely not as good as ours.The west end of the Forbidden City is the former residence of the Crown Prince.In 1919, because the paintings of the National Academy of Painting were overcrowded, the modern works were moved here and displayed in the front room.Mostly Impressionist Expressionists, but also Cubists.Expressionism is Germany's own school of painting.With primitive spirit, frenzied tone, and rough and blurred composition, you are like being in the wild, the wind, the fire.There is a Cubist sculpture of three figures.Although most of them are triangles and straight lines, they have an air of their own, and they echo each other, as if they can really talk.The spirit of expressionism is still more or less alive: in June the Weitan company in Berlin has a so-called "popular art exhibition", selling small utensils and playthings.The toys, such as the heads of small animals and children, are quite strange and interesting.There is also a clip art exhibition in the June exhibition at the exhibition hall.Use colored paper or cloth to piece together shapes, arrange them on a piece of ground, add some sand, etc. on the one hand, to give people a sense of reality, but on the other hand, deliberately change the proportions of the shapes and the straightness of the lines, trying to avoid realistic techniques.Some modern people probably "yes" to see this kind of handicraft to be happy.

This time there are many models of small houses in the exhibition, both big and small.It probably saves money to build; the air, light, and sun in the house are enough for modern people.There are no useless decorations, only horizontal and vertical straight lines.Use color, or use contrasting colors, to teach people to see a house as a "whole", not fragmented or trivial.This is true of small houses, and so is "mansion".Architecture in Germany is different from the Netherlands.They pay attention to practicality and regard simplicity as beauty, sometimes it is too simple.In recent years, many new houses of this kind have been built in Berlin.This is no longer the experiment of a few artists but the needs of ordinary people. There are all around the "New West District".The houses in that area are small and neat, and the decorations inside are neat and tidy, not dull at all. Most of the "mansions" are in the Alexander Field in the east, which seems to be less beautiful.Some are full of horizontal lines, like sand cakes, and some are full of straight lines, which naturally refer to windows.It is said that it is American influence to use straight line.But American houses are so high that they fit in straight lines; the buildings in Berlin are much lower and spread out horizontally, so they are greatly inconsistent with straight lines. In addition to the "building", there are also "squares", the exhibition hall just mentioned is one of them.There are eight large exhibition halls in this square, covering a total area of ​​182,000 square feet with ancillary rooms;When I first walked in, I couldn't figure it out, as if I would lose myself.The buildings are all new.If the whole venue is seen from the air, it is a pattern, light but not heavy.The Deutsches Stadion and the Central Airport are also new squares of this type.The first two are in the west, and the latter is in the south. Naturally, both are outside the city.In addition, movie theater dance halls are often the first to gain popularity, and there are also some new styles.For example, in the Tethania Palace Cinema, the stage, the lamp, and the flower building, either use circles, arcs, or curves similar to arcs. What is needed is a clean and neat one.Round and round on the stage, what looks like a pan flute is a pipe organ.The organ is the most cumbersome to arrange, but the arrangement here is fresh and pleasing to the eye. Maybe the movie organ is simpler, so it can be done like this.The color is contrasted with silver and light yellow, which teaches people to stay awake.The motherland dance hall is also a new style, but it mostly uses straight lines; the color seems to be more black.There are many cafes here.The Japanese room will be furnished in Japanese style, and the Turkish room will be furnished in Turkish style.There is also the Rhine Room, with the scenery of the Rhine River painted on the wall, dotted with many small electric lights on the sky-blue background, which seems to have the meaning of night on the river-naturally, no lights are used in other parts of the room.There is also a thunder and lightning chamber, where scenes of thunder and lightning are painted on the walls, which are operated by electric light; lightning shoots thunder and echoes with music.People who love to be lively go there.

To the southwest of Berlin is Potsdam, the city of Frederick the Great.There is a garden of no worries outside the city, and there is a palace of no worries in the garden, which is the place where the emperor always lives.The emperor was fascinated by France, this palace and this garden are all like Versailles.But the scale is much smaller, and the spirit is far worse.The emperor and Voltaire were good friends, and he invited Voltaire to live in the palace for a few days, and that room was at the west end of the palace.There is a big windmill to the west of the palace.It is said that the emperor didn't like the sound of the windmill turning day and night, so he sent someone to tell the owner that he wanted to buy it.Unexpectedly, the owner refused.The emperor was annoyed, and sent someone to say that if it is not sold, it will be demolished.The owner was also annoyed, saying that he would tear it down and I would sue him.The emperor didn't expect the country people to be so stubborn, so he appreciated it very much, so the windmill had no choice but to let it run.Therefore, it is now called "the windmill of history".Not many roads away from Wushou Palace, there is a new palace, which has a "shell hall", with beautiful shells and precious stones inlaid on the walls and floors. Although it is weird, it is more elegant than it is.

Finished on December 22, 1933. (Originally published in "Middle School Students" No. 32 on February 1, 1934)